Introduction

David Bowie created an expansive body of work. Spotify’s biography of him starts by noting that “[t]he cliché about David Bowie is that he was a musical chameleon […]” What patterns can we find in his many coloured oeuvre? Does clustering show the Berlin trilogy as an entity separate from the other albums? If so, can we see an influence of recording location in general? Do the albums with producer Tony Visconti form a cluster? I hope to visualise some interesting results.

The corpus consists of the studio albums. Compilations, live albums and rarities will be excluded from the selection. This is to prevent overlap and to focus the results.

The Berlin Trilogy

The Berlin Trilogy consists of the albums Low (1977), Heroes (1977), and Lodger (1979). Collaborator Brian Eno’s instrumental ambient influence is apparent. Let’s look at how the trilogy scores at acousticness and instrumentalness in Spotify’s analysis. The following plots show acousticness and instrumentalness of the first 17 studio albums by Bowie, from his debut David Bowie (1967) to Never Let Me Down (1987).

Where most albums score low on instrumentalness, Heroes and Low exhibit a high degree of instrumentalness. Lodger is somewhat instrumental, but not enough to identify the Berlin Trilogy by instrumentalness alone. But if we combine instrumentalness (at least one track above 0.7) with a wide spread on the acousticness scale, we have a description of what makes the trilogy stand out in this visualization.

Outlier: Sense of Doubt

Valence is a measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry). Sense of Doubt is the first of three instrumental tracks on “Heroes”. This is the track with lowest valence of the corpus (0.0365). In fact, the five tracks with lowest valence are all from Low and “Heroes”, both Berlin Trilogy albums. In the chromagram we see the (filtered) white noise of the first seven seconds. Troughout the instrumental the A is very present.